Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Review of Zemanta for Blogging Optimization

I recently learned about Zemanta and installed it so it would active for my most recent blog post on Wednesday. I had read positive reviews that it optimized your blog by providing relevant image and web links in a pop up menu. The installation on the Firefox browser was no problem, but I have a mixed review of the program.

PROS
*I liked the suggested tags that popped up for the Labels and chose almost all of them. They matched what I would have selected manually.
*I also liked the suggested web page links and selected 2 to appear at the end of the blog post, one that related to Obama's birthday, and another that linked to a post Darren Rouse at Problogger wrote last week about being the life of the social media party.

CONS
*The registration and profile setup was a bit awkward. Several times, I fill out the menu items, saved them, and then they disappeared!
This happened both when I used the Autosave feature as well as the manual Save.
*The program seems to drain a lot of memory and I had trouble navigating my cursor around the page.
*The image gallery that pops up contextually was a disappointment, as none of the images seemed to be relevant to birthdays, although many for social media popped up.

SUMMARY
While I like the idea of the automated links and images, it's not worth sacrificing the performance on my computer. I might try an upgraded version of this program later in the game, but for now it's slowing down my system too much and the features aren't worth it.

Final grade: B- (Sorry Zemanta.)
If any Zemanta reps are out there and want to respond to this post and how I might optimize the program better, please contact me, I'm open to it.

(Note: I want to add a suggested link right here and the program will not recognize my cursor in the Compose mode.)

Here's how the screen looked when I began typing Wednesday's blog on social media's similarities to birthday parties.

You can fill in your social media profiles and Amazon affiliate ID when you register.

Further customization includes links to your own blog feed and Flickr account, which you can draw on for relevant links.